1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to computing systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for compression in a memory system.
2. Description of Related Art
Over the years, processor speeds have increased at a faster rate than that of memory. Consequently, the gap between the speed of the processor and memory has widened and memory access latencies are of increasing concern. While cache hierarchy research is ongoing, computer architects have generally addressed this speed gap problem by simply adding more memory resources. As a result this approach, the size of caches and the amount of main memory, particularly in server systems, has increased steadily over the last decades. Therefore, techniques that utilize memory resources more effectively are of increasing importance as they may reduce the cost and the space consumed by memory resources.
One approach to more effective use of memory resources involves utilizing compression. For example, lossless data compression techniques have been used to utilize main memory resources more effectively. To be effective, however, these methods operate on relatively large data chunks, typically in the range of page sizes. Consequently, such techniques may be less effective for compressing data at the granularity of typical cache block sizes. Another technique uses significance-based compression (SBC) algorithms for compression of data chunks in the range of typical cache block sizes. However, none of the above techniques is directed to the use of simple compression techniques on memory-level data